Grendel

John Gardner

Chapter 4

Chapter 6

Summary

Grendel finds himself in the presence of a huge, red-golden
dragon that lives in a cave filled with gold and gems. The dragon
has been expecting Grendel, and he takes cruel pleasure in Grendel’s
fright and discomfort. He laughs obscenely and points out that Grendel’s reaction
to him is just like the humans’ reaction to Grendel. Angered by
the dragon’s spitefulness, Grendel picks up an emerald to throw at
him, but stops at the dragon’s sharp words. Grendel, pausing to consider
the dragon’s comparison between himself and the humans, decides
to stop scaring the humans merely for sport. Reading his mind, the
dragon scoffs at the idea, asking him brusquely: “Why not frighten
them?”

The dragon claims to know everything about everything.
As a more highly evolved creature than Grendel and the humans, the dragon
has a vision of the world that is beyond anything these low creatures
can comprehend. The dragon sees both backward and forward in time,
though he quickly disabuses Grendel of the notion that this vision
gives the dragon any kind of power to change things. The dragon
ascertains that Grendel has come seeking answers about the Shaper,
and he begins by explaining the flaws in human thinking. Lacking
the total vision that the dragon has, humans approximate by gluing
isolated facts together and trying to link them into logical chains
and rational systems. Every once in a while, the humans sense that
their systems are actually nonsense—that is where the Shaper steps
in. The Shaper, through the power of his imaginative art, provides
the Danes with an illusion that their systems are real. In reality,
of course, the Shaper has no broader vision than any other man,
and he is still working within the same limited system of facts
and observations. His system may be neat and ordered, but it is
entirely contrived.

The curmudgeonly dragon launches into a sprawling philosophical
discussion, in which he has difficulty making his points understandable
to the simple, childlike Grendel. Grendel, for his part, is skeptical
about the dragon’s conclusions, but he listens anyway. The dragon
explains that humans have a tendency to extrapolate theories and
grossly generalize from the limited evidence they have, hampered
as they are by their restricted vision of the world. The dragon
also explains to Grendel how all nature inevitably moves toward
more complex forms of organization. He illustrates his point by
comparing a vegetable to an animal. If a vegetable is split into
many different pieces, nothing changes from piece to piece; its organization
of molecules remains consistent throughout its body. An animal,
however, has a center of dominant activity—the head—and if that
center is severed from the rest of the animal, the entire coordination
collapses. The dragon makes the same comparison between a rock and
a human. The rock, a less complex object, makes no distinctions
about what it attracts gravitationally. Man, on the other hand,
organizes, makes selections, and then acts systematically upon his
environment.

Grendel and the dragon reach a frustrated impasse. Finally,
the dragon reveals that the world Grendel knows is no more than
a small ripple in the stream of Time, a gathering of dust that will
fade away completely when enough years pass. All of man’s monuments, systems,
and inventions will eventually fade from the world entirely. Even
the dragon himself will be killed someday. In light of this vision,
the dragon scoffs at Grendel’s attempts to change or improve himself.
He grants that Grendel does have a kind of purpose in life: he is
man’s “brute existent,” the enemy against which man will come to
define himself. Grendel drives man toward the lofty planes of art,
science, and religion, but he is infinitely replaceable in this capacity.
Whether Grendel sticks with man, helps the poor, or feeds the hungry
is irrelevant in the long run. The dragon, for his part, plans only
to count all his money and perhaps sort it out into piles. After
ridiculing humankind’s theories about God, the dragon gives Grendel
a final piece of advice: “seek out gold and sit on it.”

Analysis

In the words of the crabby but oddly charismatic dragon,
Grendel finds a vision as powerful and provocative as the Shaper’s.
Indeed, throughout the rest of the novel, the philosophies of the
Shaper and the dragon battle against each other within Grendel’s
mind. In contrast to the ordered worldview of the Shaper, the dragon
sees the world as a chaotic, meaningless place, a vision that speaks
to the spiritual disconnectedness that Grendel has been experiencing
up to this point. The dragon finds the Shaper’s efforts to impose
meaning on an inherently meaningless world to be ridiculous and
small-minded. The meaningful patterns and systems that man creates—history,
for example, or religion—are hollow and unfounded. In the face of
this all-encompassing vision, the most passionate response the dragon
can muster is a crankily resigned cynicism.

In philosophical terms, Grendel’s visit with the dragon
pushes Grendel’s inherent existentialism to the more extreme philosophy
of nihilism. Existentialism is a school of thought that presupposes
the absence of God and a total lack of meaning in life. As such,
existentialism asserts that there are no intrinsic morals or values
in the world: man has complete freedom to assert any meaning—or
no meaning—as he pleases. Nihilism takes existentialism a step further, to
an even bleaker worldview. Like existentialists, nihilists deny
the existence of any inherent meaning or value in the world. Under
such a system, meaningful distinctions between things are impossible, and
therefore all attempts to make such distinctions eventually come
to nothing. To the dragon, the values of piety, charity, nobility, and
altruism are totally interchangeable irrelevancies. The dragon’s notion
that the passage of time will erase all evidence of mankind speaks
directly to one of the anxieties found in the original Beowulf text.
As a record of historical acts of bravery, the entire purpose of Beowulf is
to ensure the fame of its hero and the culture of warriors he represents.
For that community, fame acts as a bulwark against the ravages of
time. The dragon, however, would reply that fame, too, must fade
with time.

Though the dragon is a fully realized character—indeed,
the only character besides Beowulf with whom Grendel has any significant dialogue—many
critics have proposed that the dragon is not a real being, but comes
instead from within Grendel’s own psyche. The dragon seems to live
in another dimension, one reached not by a physical journey but
a mental one, as Grendel has to “make his mind a blank” in order
to approach the dragon. Moreover, several characteristics of the
dragon are echoes of things Grendel has previously witnessed: the
dragon’s “nyeh heh heh” laugh, for example, recalls the laugh of
the goldworker Grendel once watched at Hart. The dragon is a curious
amalgam of dragon imagery from widely varying sources, including
Asiatic mythology, Christian texts, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien,
which were enjoying a surge in popularity at the time of Grendel’s
publication.

Despite the dragon’s claims of complete, unlimited knowledge, we
should follow Grendel’s lead and regard the dragon and his teachings
with some amount of skepticism. The dragon hardly bears any of the
characteristics one would expect in a sage old teacher. Wheezing,
greedy, and slightly effete, he spouts a torrent of philosophical
chatter that seems to parody man’s own convoluted attempts at making
meaning. In fact, the dragon actually quotes a human philosopher
extensively in his lecture to Grendel: whole passages are lifted
without attribution from Alfred North Whitehead’s Modes
of Thought. The dragon’s instruction to “know thyself”
is lifted from an inscription at the oracle-shrine in Delphi, Greece.
The dragon is more closely linked, though, with the existentialist
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a man whose philosophy Gardner often vehemently
criticized. In fact, Gardner frequently commented that, aside from Beowulf, the
second “source” text for Grendel is Sartre’s Being
and Nothingness.

Spent a lot of years working on 'Beowulf' and I reckon that the monsters represent human characters. In my view: Grendel represents Agnar, son of Ingeld; Grendel's Mum represents the daughter of Earl Swerting of Sweden (and the first wife of Ingeld); and the Dragon represents Onela, king of the Swedes. I think that there has been a scribal error right at the beginning of the poem, which has made Scyld's 'bearn' (Modern English, 'bairn') into Beowulf the First. Thus the real parallels of the poem have been lost.